Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
16 February 2020
Well, Winding Down is finally back. A thank you to everyone for their patience!
This week we have an important security note for those of you still using Windows 7 – you can skip it if you’re not using Windows 7...
We start the meaty part of the newsletter with (cue fanfare of trumpets) Boeing! What a surprise... This time it’s their Starliner Space Capsule, and also a bit about an attempt to re-open the enquiry on the crash of a 737-800 in Holland in 2009.
Other stories include spilled coffee in Airbus cockpits, the demise of the tech conferences, China’s commercial space industry, and the story of Crypto AG. Pictures include images from the Landscape Photographer of the Year competition, Travel Photographer of the Year winners, and a video of ice calving from a glacier.
There are two quotes, one about the words “factually inaccurate”, and one about Londoners. And, finally, Scanner has URLs pointing to material on astronauts, Crew Dragon, broadband, traffic jams, fruit fly brain connections, and Zuckerberg.
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Important! Windows 7 users:
“if you’re still using Windows 7 and/or Windows Server 2008 R2 and you haven’t paid Microsoft for extended security support, there’s trouble brewing. There are five critical holes among 42 vulns in the end-of-life operating systems that need fixing. Bear in mind that criminals will already be hard at work reverse engineering the patches, and finding out how to write exploit code for them, so upgrade to a newer platform or start paying coin to Redmond.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/11/patch_tuesday_february_2020/
Updates:
Well, while Winding Down was absent from your digital mail boxes, Boeing were racking up more software errors. This time it was in their Starliner, which was doing a test docking with the International Space Station in orbit around the earth. The first error was widely publicised and prevented the capsule from actually docking.
But there was a much less reported second error which could have caused the service module to crash into crew module. Fortunately, the error was spotted by the ground crew and corrected before anything disastrous happened.
Unsurprisingly, NASA’s independent review panel is recommending a complete review of Boeing’s software verification process. That’s a million lines of code. Good luck!
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615161/nasa-a-second-unreported-glitch-could-have-wrecked-boeings-starliner/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/10/more_software_errors_beset_boeings_calamity_capsule/
But that’s not all from Boeing over the last few weeks. The Dutch parliament want to re-open an enquiry into a Turkish Airlines crash near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport back in 2009. Nine people were killed when the 737-800 crashed while preparing to land, and the Dutch are raising questions about similarities with more recent crashes, what lessons were drawn, and what action was taken.
As a Euronews article notes, “In a statement, the DSB noted that the 2010 report made clear that a key responsibility for the crash lies with Boeing, giving the failure of systems on board of the Boeing 737-800 and the way that Boeing responded to earlier warnings”. DSB is the Dutch Safety Board.
Boeing has declined to appear before the Dutch House of representatives, and has made it clear that it is opposed to re-opening the enquiry. To be fair, Boeing are likely to lose out whether they participate or not in a reopened enquiry, which will look at whether they took any notice of the issues raised in the original enquiry.
https://www.euronews.com/2020/02/07/boeing-refuse-to-play-ball-as-dutch-mps-reopen-2009-crash-case-involving-737-max
Air Travel:
Here’s something to do with air travel that’s not about Boeing! It seems that on Airbus A350 airliners, quite a few of the controls and displays are laid out on a horizontal panel between the pilot and co-pilot seats.
Where better to put your cup of hot coffee between sips!
And indeed that’s exactly what has happened on a number of occasions, resulting in coffee in the works, and sometimes in an engine shut down while in flight! So now the EU Aviation Safety Agency has taken steps to ban liquids from a cockpit zone that includes the panel. They clearly don’t have anyone on the panel that is a specialist in human behaviour. They need to ban liquids anywhere in the cockpit, or else pilots will get sloppy and we will have more of these problems.
Oh and maybe a behavioural psychologist on the Airbus cockpit deign team in future, so that there aren’t surfaces that you can put coffee on!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/06/a350_cockpit_coffee_ban/
Tech Conferences:
Industry conferences are a bust this year because of the coronavirus epidemic. Vendors are pulling out left, right and centre, unwilling to chance liability if any of their employees catch the virus, I suspect. Take, for instance, the Mobile World Congress scheduled to be held in Barcelona, which is usually a venue for the big boys to announce shiny new products.
Nokia, BT, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom have now pulled out, joining Sony, Amazon, NTT Docomo and Nvidia, and VIAVI Solutions (5G infrastructure people) who pulled out earlier.
Sony, wisely in my view, opted to promote its new wares with a video conference. At least you can’t get biological viruses transmitted that way!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/10/big_names_shun_mwc/
PS: Overheard on the London tube (subway) this week: “Well what do you reckon to this coronary violence bug then”...
Space:
Those of you who follow the development of the commercial space industry might be interested in a piece on China’s budding commercial space industry published in the ‘The Space Review’. The assessment seems pretty comprehensive, and is a must for those interested in the space race, since it seems likely that China will be the USA’s main competitor in this field in the not too distant future!
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3872/1
Security, Hacking, & Cryptography:
It’s the security story of the decade – well quite a few previous decades actually! It seems that a Swiss based company called Crypto AG, purveyors of fine crypto machines to the governments of some 120 countries between the end of World War II and the end of the century, was not what it seemed.
Oh, it did produce high grade crypto machines, no doubt about that. The problem was that the company was secretly owned by the US Central Intelligence Agency and Germany’s BND Federal Intelligence Service!
There were rumours about this, of course, but, then, there would be wouldn’t there? Whether it was true or not. And true it was, and something like 40% of foreign communications processed by US code breakers came from work on code from Crypto AG machines!
Quite a little coup!
https://www.afp.com/en/news/3954/us-german-spies-plundered-global-secrets-swiss-encryption-firm-report-doc-1ox0953
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/14/silly_police_infosec_parental_advice_poster/
Pictures:
Breathtaking images from the Landscape Photographer of the Year competition
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-51386024
Antarctica: tower block-sized ice mass smashes into sea [video]
https://www.euronews.com/2020/02/06/dramatic-glacier-collapse-in-antarctica-as-tower-block-sized-ice-mass-smashes-into-sea
Tour the world with the Travel Photographer of the Year winners [My favs: 5 & 9 – AL]
https://newatlas.com/digital-cameras/tpoty-2019-travel-photographer-of-the-year-winners-gallery/
Quotes:
Two quotes for you this week. The first is from The Register online tech news site reporting on problems at GitLab.
“Whenever we hear the words “factually inaccurate” from an organization, it is usually those two words that are factually inaccurate.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/06/gitlab_sales_women/
The second piece is especially for my American readers. It’s part of an article in Londonist by an American, advising his compatriots on how to handle Londoners and London.
“Londoners do not want to improve. They are super-happy the way they are. Yes, they don’t have dryers that really work on their clothing, and the cold water and hot water come out of different taps — which is insane — but they love it. This is a city filled with people who bankrupted Jamie Oliver’s restaurants because he tried to get them to eat marginally healthier. Don’t criticise. Just chill out and put on your slightly-damp t-shirts.”
https://londonist.com/london/comedy/tips-americans-london
Scanner:
Here are the qualifications you need to be among NASA’s next intake of astronauts
https://www.sciencealert.com/apply-now-nasa-is-looking-for-the-next-generation-of-astronauts
NASA confirms Crew Dragon almost ready, mostly paperwork left
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/historic-crew-dragon-flight-now-targeted-for-an-early-may-launch/
Looking for a great value broadband deal? War-torn Syria will do you proud!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/21/global_broadband_pricing_league_table_2020/
https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparison/
Man creates fake traffic jam on Google Maps by carting around 99 cellphones
https://boingboing.net/2020/02/03/man-creates-fake-traffic-jam-o.html
This is the most comprehensive brain wiring diagram ever attempted
https://newatlas.com/science/google-janelia-fruit-fly-brain-connectome/
People are calling for Zuckerberg’s resignation. Here are just five of the reasons why.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613513/people-are-calling-for-zuckerbergs-resignation-here-are-just-five-of-the-reasons-why/
Footnote
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
16 February 2020
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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